Dr. Bresser, who was still our best home friend, came to my aid.
“In reality, your excellence, can you trust to the honest and sincere desire for peace of men who are soldiers from passionate enthusiasm? who will not hear of anything which endangers war—viz., disarmaments, leagues of states, arbitration courts? And could the delight in arsenals and fortresses and manœuvres and so forth persist, if these things were looked on merely as what they are held out as being—mere scarecrows? So that the whole money expended on their erection is spent only in order that they may never be used? The peoples are to be obliged to give up all their money to make fortifications on their frontiers with a view of kissing hands to each other across those frontiers? The army is thus to be brought down to the level of a mere gendarmerie for the maintenance of peace, and ‘the most exalted War-lord’ is to preside merely over a crowd of perpetual shunners of war? No; behind this mask, the si vis pacem mask, glances of understanding wink at each other, and the deputies who vote every war-budget wink at the same time.”
“The representatives of the people?” broke in the Minister. “Surely the spirit of sacrifice is worthy of nothing but praise, which in threatening seasons they never fail to show, and which finds cheering expression in the unanimous acceptance of the appropriate laws.”
“Forgive me, your excellence. I should like to call out to those unanimous voters, one ofter the other, ‘Your “Yes” will rob that mother of her only child. Yours will put that poor fellow’s eyes out. Yours will set fire to a collection of books which cannot be replaced. Yours will dash out the brains of a poet who would have been the glory of your country. But you have all voted “yes” to this, just in order not to appear cowards, as if the only thing one had to fear in giving assent was what regards oneself. Is then human egotism so great that this is the only motive which can be suggested for opposing war? Well, I grant you egotism is great: for each one of you prefers to hound on a hundred thousand men to destruction rather than that you should expose your dear self even to the suspicion of having ever experienced one single paroxysm of fear.’ ”
“I hope, my good doctor,” said the colonel dryly, “that you may never become a deputy; the whole house would hiss you down.”
“Well, to expose myself to the risk of that would suffice for a proof that I am not a coward. It is swimming against the stream which requires the strength of steel.”
“But suppose the moment of danger should come, and we should be found unprepared?”
“Let such a condition of justice be instituted as would make the occurrence of ‘the moment of danger’ an impossibility. For what such a moment might be, colonel, no one can at present form any clear conception. With the dreadfulness of the science of warlike implements which we have already attained, and which is constantly advancing, with the enormous proportions of the powers engaged in the contest, the next war will in reality be no mere ‘moment of danger’. But there is really no word for it. A time of gigantic misery—aid and nursing out of the question—sanitary reforms and the arrangements for provisioning will appear as mere irony in face of the demands upon them. The next war, about which people talk so glibly and so indifferently, will not be a gain for one side and loss for the other, but ruin for all. Who amongst us here votes for this ‘moment of danger’?”
“Not I, to be sure,” said the Minister, “and not you either, dear doctor; but men in general, and not our Government—I will be surety for them—but the other states.”
“What right have you to think other men worse and more unreasonable than you or I? Now I will tell you a little story:—